Standards

I was reflecting today while putting together some thoughts for class, that learning / memorizing a single standard is useful, but learning how to learn standards, can be so much more valuable.

We have covered MARC and EAD, DACS, ISAD(G), and the list goes on. Obviously, each of these is critically important and uniquely interesting in their own right, but they do not lend themselves to a linear read. Standards encapuslate everything from history, to why, to how, to specific rules, to integration with other standards. Each standard is a complex network of information with muliptle inroads, and cannot be treated as a linear text to be read once and understood in its entirety. Furthermore, standards may vary greatly from one to another. Some may explain tag libraries for EAD based standards, others might attempt to codify norms of behavior or philosophies of a body into workflows and decision trees.

However different they might be, and how little they may lend themselves to a single-read-and-understand, standards also share a striking similarity: they are standards! They are attemping to make order out of chaos, impose or suggest a way of doing things so that people and systems may be interoperable across space and time. And in this similarity, they open themselves up to those familiar with standards.

Just today I was reading the meeting notes from a Hydra / Sufia related working group that was interested in codifying the metadata principles and formats for Sufia. It was mentioned that a handful of well made standards in other, related areas were using a fixed set of words to help standardize the standards! Words like: MUST, SHOULD, ALLOW, that would help humans and machines parse the rules for this particular standard. The IIIF Image API is a nice example of a relatively new standard, where a considerable amount of work has been done to make sure it is expressive, succinct, and unambiguous. The discussions leading up to the standard, I’m sure, where quite lively and full of questioning. But the result is a standard with clear language and vision.

So, back to my notes, I got to thinking. The value of learning some of these standards is not to internalize their every twist and turn, their specific rules or exceptions, but to instead feel their radiating essence. What standards are similar? What standards are complimentary? How much of the standard documentation is narrative, how much is meant to be referenced? How much is distinctly machine-readable (thinking RDF ontologies, XML schemas, etc.)?

If it is anything like learning programming languages - and I believe that it is - learning the shape and confines of single standard opens the door to picking up other standards quickly. The first time you see MUST and SHOULD in a document are jarring, but seeing them in a different standard’s documentation is comforting like an old friend.